How Can You Treat Someone Who Doesn’t Accept They Are Ill?

August 7, 2018

(Mosaic) – Unlike in denial, when an individual knows there’s something wrong but insists they’re fine, Babinski believed that his patients weren’t fibbing or confused; they genuinely had no concept that half their body was paralysed. Something in their brains – he couldn’t say what – was damaged. For the next eight decades, anosognosia featured exclusively in the neurology literature, associated with physical conditions. Not until the mid-1990s did a few psychiatrists begin to try and apply the word to their patients, too. The pushback came almost immediately.